Grammar Education Articles for Teachers

Grammar doesn’t have to be boring. In fact, the kids in my class have a pretty good time learning about parts of speech, especially prepositions. Prepositions are easy to teach; just follow this quick lesson geared toward middle schoolers, or modify the content to make it more accessibl...

What's the difference between a sentence and a fragment? A sentence has a main clause; that is, it contains a subject, a verb, and it expresses a complete thought. Whereas a fragment doesn't. If you copy and paste the line above into a word processing program, your grammar checker will tell you i...

Once upon a time in America, students spent their school days parsing passive verb constructions, slaving over subject-verb agreement, and anguishing about antecedents. Those were the days. Reformers are quick, and correct, to note that much about education has improved since the era of Warriner'...

Recently, the "New York Times" On Language column opened a grammatical can of worms with its commentary about indefinite pronouns (you can read the column for yourself here). The debate regarding making words such as everyone, anybody, someone, and nobody agree with personal p...

  Today's topic is adverbs. Adverbs really give people fits. They seem to be very difficult to teach, too. Many teachers would quite gladly skip over them altogether. To begin with, whoever started the ugly rumor that adverbs end in -ly is at the top of my wet noodle list. This "rule" crosse...